One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
(Don't) Shout it out loud
The words you use matter. They change and shape the world around you.
How you say what you say is no trivial matter.
One particularly powerful example of this is the idea of asking people for what you want, not what you don’t want.
I’ve come across this in my parenting adventures, and Kayte and I try our best to practice it.
Things like asking, “Could you say that quietly?” as opposed to “Could you not shout?” when trying to lower the volume in the house.
The former emphasizes quiet, the latter shouting.
Here’s a video with a great example of this in the adult world. (Shared with me by friend and fellow daily emailer Rod Aparicio.)
In it, David Marquet, a retired US Navy Captain, tells us about a moment in early American history. He suggests word choice may have been responsible for dramatic, cascading effects!
(Not to be clickbaity, but I’m compelled to leave it at that and let David do the talking.)
At any rate, it’s a Tactical Tuesday topic because it’s good to keep in mind as you craft your messaging.
Of course, there’s value in speaking to people’s pain points and listing things like “who this isn’t for.” But when all that’s left in their minds is the echo of what you’ve said, make sure it compels them in the right direction.
To reach out, book a call, buy your thing, or stay tuned for more.
I'll be emailing tomorrow,
James
One Creative Moment
One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
One of the things missing from much of the “get AI to do everything for you” messaging is this fact: writing isn’t just a product, it’s a process. Yes, it’s nice to have “content.” But thinking that having it is the only outcome that matters is shallow and short-sighted. One of the things that has astounded me since I started writing daily(ish) emails back in November 2022 is how much it has changed me. It has vastly improved my ability to think—and to put those thoughts into clear, concise...
If you want to achieve more, do less. That is to say, build time into your day, your week, your year for quiet. In our house, following lunch, there is a period of mandated quiet time. It gives everyone a chance to do something they’d otherwise not do: nothing. It could be napping, reading, working on art, or even listening to something specific on headphones—as long as it’s quiet and done alone. For Kayte and I, it’s almost always napping, lol. During that time, we can recharge. We can...
“…We are ‘persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.’” This is Kate Raworth quoting Economist Tim Jackson in her book Doughnut Economics while discussing the power of aspiration in influencing human behaviour. Reading this, I realized that seeing (or at least feeling) this is what kept me from marketing for so long. (And what keeps me from engaging in much of its mainstream still.) I thought of it only as a...